CRYPTO FLAGSHIP: Samsung's latest flagship cellphone will include a dedicated secure storage function designed for cryptocurrency private keys.
The Galaxy S10 was formally unveiled Wednesday, with the world's largest smartphone producer announcing: "Galaxy S10 is built with defense-grade Samsung Knox, as well as a secure storage backed by hardware, which houses your private keys for blockchain-enabled mobile services."
Further details about the crypto solution were not immediately available.
Still, the S10 joins a slowly growing line of smartphones designed with cryptocurrencies in mind, including HTC’s EXODUS 1 and Sirin Labs’ Finney, both of which were announced last year. Samsung is the largest phone manufacturer to unveil a blockchain feature in a phone to date, though, and unlike either of its competitors’ products, may see the widest distribution. Full Story
SAFER HANDS: Ernst and Young, the professional services firm appointed as a monitor for troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, has taken control of all its remaining cryptocurrencies.
EY published a report Thursday confirming that it was holding 51 BTC, 951 ETH, 2,000 BTG, 822 LTC and 33 BCH previously sitting in Quadriga’s hot wallets. The news comes after Quadriga “inadvertently” sent more than 100 BTC into a cold wallet due to an automated process.
The report also outlined where the exchange was in terms of securing the fiat holdings Quadriga had stored with third-party payment processors: EY has currently taken control of more than $20 million CAD from one processor, though the firm, Costodian, is maintaining control of another $5 million CAD and $70,000 USD that it says belongs to its owner and operator Jose Reyes. Full Story
BLOCKCHAIN CONNECT: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seriously evaluating blockchain’s potential to allow internet users to log in to various services via one set of credentials without relying on third parties.
Such a use for the technology would make a compelling alternative to services like Facebook Connect, the social media giant’s single sign-on (SSO) application, Zuckerberg said in a recently posted video interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain.
“A use of blockchain that I’ve been thinking about … though I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out, is around authentication and… granting access to your information to different services,” he said. “So, replacing the notion of what we have with Facebook Connect with something that is truly distributed.”
“Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice to log into places without going through an intermediary,” Zuckerberg added.
This arrangement for logins would appeal to software developers who don’t want to rely on corporations that can cut off users’ access, Zuckerberg said. Yet, he noted that there would also be a downside to this since it would also prevent firms from dealing with bad actors.
“The question is, do you really want that? Do you have more cases where, yes, people would be able to not have an intermediary, but there’d be more instances of abuse and recourse would be much harder?” Full Story
BYRNE'S BLOCKBUSTER: “Warning! This is all risky, it may all fail.” That was how Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, concluded his entertaining keynote about investing in blockchain at a Wednesday event in New York hosted by investment bank and brokerage Oppenheimer & Co.
Byrne had opened his presentation by providing a brief overview of traditional securities trading and its pitfalls – highlighting, as he has been wont to do for years, the fact that due to the arcane structure of today’s market, the ownership of stocks is indirect and somehow dubious.
“All the corporate shares in America are owned by the company called Cede & Co, and what you actually have is a contractual claim against a corporation, that has a contractual claim against another corporation, that has a contractual claim against DTCC, that has a contractual claim against Cede & Co. What can go wrong?” he said.
Byrne went on to proclaim that blockchain, by improving transparency and minimizing the need for trust, can bring capital markets to the state where “all kinds of systemic risks go away,” as people cannot meddle with the process or act dishonestly.
“Imagine we have a magic ledger which is cryptographically protected, public and transparent – no way to cheat,” he mused, provoking a few chuckles in the room. Full Story
DIY NODES: A project aiming to empower people to build nodes that can send and route payments on bitcoin’s in-development lightning network has officially released version 1.0 of its code.
Announced this week, RaspiBlitz has published finalized instructions for building a lightning node on a tiny hobbyist computer called a Raspberry Pi. Its toolkit, costing roughly $100 including the Pi, aims to enable the creation of nodes that can send and secure small bitcoin payments in a trustless way.
Setting it apart from other lightning nodes, the device’s final form is equipped with a LCD screen and software that boots up a colorful interface (showing an ASCII lightning symbol and the node’s public key). As such, the finished product arguably gives a more visual window into what’s going on with their lightning node.
“In general, the version 1.0 signals that I see the RaspiBlitz package is ready to be shared with friends and colleagues for its intended purpose: To set up a bitcoin and lightning node during a workshop, which takes about 3 hours, or as a do-it-yourself (DIY) project over the weekend when you order the parts from Amazon,” project lead Christian Rootzoll told CoinDesk. Full Story |
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